


Ere lang the play was play'd

by goosecathedral



Category: English and Scottish Popular Ballads - Francis James Child, Sir Patrick Spens (Traditional Ballad)
Genre: 17th Century, Imperialism, M/M, Mentions of enslavement, Non-Graphic Violence, Non-explicit BDSM, Period Typical Attitudes, Scotland, Scots Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-24 15:56:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21820561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goosecathedral/pseuds/goosecathedral
Summary: Sir Patrick Spens has a long history with the Eldern Knight.
Relationships: Sir Patrick Spens/Eldern Knight, Sir Patrick Spens/OMC (mentioned), Sir Patrick Spens/Sailor (mentioned)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 4
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Ere lang the play was play'd

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Selden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selden/gifts).



> This story sets the ballad in a particular historical period, but liberties have been taken with chronology and period accuracy; it should be regarded as taking place in essentially the fantasy world of the ballads.

They were bedfellows from the gloomy mild Martinmas upon which they came into the household of the Earl of Montrose. For seven years Hector’s silken yellow hair mingled with his friend’s unruly black curls by night, as by day his courteous and unboyish voice, marked with the solemn tonality of one who has not heard English spoken from the cradle, rose gentle against Patrick’s braid Scots. Hector’s father and his uncles were all for bishops, and Patrick’s were agin them, but that signified little to the two of them, long parted from their native places, because they owed their best devotion to the lord they served, and to the king.

Though the last Earl to be observed a papist was the present one’s grandfather, there was nothing of puritanism in my lord Graham, and Sunday was for all his followers a day of recreation and merriment. So it was that the two pages were to be found under waterish but persistent spring sunshine, playing ducks and drakes on Loch Mugdock.

Patrick’s stone bounded merrily sixteen times, seventeen— ‘Eighteen!’ he shouted triumphantly as it submitted to the grey glitter, and sank. ‘Ane for ilka winter I’ve lived. Beat that, you glaizie-heided groom!’

Hector, curled in the fork of an old sycamore, laid his book on his knee. ’No. I freely grant you the bays. I have no wish ever to extend my life beyond the span of yours.’

Patrick caught a bough and swung restlessly upon it. ‘You cannae Platonize away your shilpit throwing arm. No wi me.’

‘Be serious. Do you think a man may have more than one friend?’

‘No _may_ , he maun. As mony as he might, for guid cheer and sikerness.’

‘This Frenchman says not. Listen. _As for the rest, those we ordinarily call friends and amities, are but acquaintances and familiarities… In the amity I speak of, they intermix and confound themselves one in the other, with so universal a commixture, that they wear out and can no more find the seam that hath conjoined them together. If a man urge me to tell wherefore I loved him, I feel it cannot be expressed, but by answering: because it was he, because it was myself._ ’

Hector’s long countenance had a kind of sweet terror upon it; something like Patrick had seen on the faces of men knighted before a skirmish.

‘Do you mean us? Aye.’

Hector tucked the book into his doublet and jumped down. ‘Pledge yourself.’

‘I will. I do.’ He would, indeed, have done anything, as many times before he had done something foolhardy and dangerous, rather than lose Hector’s good opinion. But when Hector nudged up his chin with thumb and foreknuckle and kissed him, not as they were wont to kiss, in rough jest and brotherly greeting, but reverently, soberly, as lovers kiss, Patrick was borne away in desire and determination such as he had never felt but the shadow of before.

‘No here,’ he said, as their lips parted, leaving him flushed, hard and hungry. ‘The castle owerlooks aathing. I ken whaur tae go.’

A mile and a half to the north-west lay a crack into the strath-side, so strait that even slender youths, as both of them then were, had to turn side-on to enter. Hector, who stood more than six foot high, was obliged to crouch as well. He put his fingers to the aperture’s mossy jamb.

‘It’s stone. Someone made this.’

‘The fowk hereaboot willnae come near. They’re feart of the Queen of Elfan. But we, being lairnit and ratiocinating men, ken it was the Pictis did it. Come _oan_.’

A black passage some thirty endless paces long gave onto a chamber, stone-girt round, bathed in washy light from a chimney high above. A shallow depression collected the rain thus admitted. Hector bent to touch it.

‘It’s carved and polished. A proper basin. I don’t think wild men in skins did this.’

‘Do you believe in the fair folk noo?’ Patrick seized Hector’s lovelock, jerking his head back. ‘Hae you forgit aaready why we’re cam here?’

Hector spun about and caught Patrick’s neck in the crook of his elbow, and having the advantage of height, gave him genuinely to struggle for a moment or two. ‘Shilpit, was that your deplorable Lawland word? I’ll fill your mouth with goodly Gaelic.’

‘And I,’ Patrick hooked his foot around Hector’s calf, ‘will put a Scots yard in your Erse.’ He threw him, but in so doing wet his heel upon the lip of the bowl, and tumbled after his friend. Hector’s flailing arm knocked Patrick’s hat, a self-conscious high-crowned felt affair with a pheasant feather, into the pool, but, astraddle Hector’s chest, he soon found an occupation he liked too well to abandon for the rescue of headgear, and by the time it was sodden and sunk, they were lost in one another.

Before night filled the chamber, a black nostrum into an apothecary’s flask, Patrick had silvered Hector’s palms and tongue for him, and Hector Patrick’s thighs. They sat, considerably dishevelled, in one another’s arms against the chill wall, looking up at the vent, hoping for a blessing from the new moon, who loves those who steal by night and get no children. But the virgin huntress skulked in her cloudy wrapper, and there came none such.

‘Do you think it is as grave a sin as they say?’ Hector murmured into the back of Patrick’s neck.

‘Gin ’tis, the heichest Stewart in the laund’ll burn wi us.’

‘Yes,’ Hector said slowly. ‘But it’s said too that it was youthful folly only, that since my lord Lennox died his Majesty has given over unnatural pleasures, and affects only women: his Queen, and lately Mistress Murray.’

‘The Duke of Lennox was major-mindit,’ Patrick mused, a little irrelevantly. ‘He didnae recant the true kirk in Fraunce, whan aabody said he’d turn Pape again.’

Hector gave a small, episcopalian snort. ’The King made enough fuss to fetch his bride, when she was thought in danger at sea.’

Patrick twisted in his arms, scrambling to his feet. ‘Ony mettlefu man would do that, aathoot there be a kimmer in the case. For the mere adventure o’it.’

‘Must you go to sea, really must you?’

‘Aye. I’m a fift brither, wi nae Hamilton cousin tae see me intae a situation at Holyroodhouse. But Hector, the sea’s the haill warld noo. It’s whaur aa honour’s won.’

‘Would my eyes could satisfy your thirst for salt water. I sometimes think they could.’ Hector said this confident that his arid face was invisible in the dark. It was only altogether baser matters than the pain of long separation, or fear for Patrick’s safety, that caused him to weep, and (to do him justice) he felt shame for his inability to shed virtuous tears.

‘Gie ower that sapsie talk. We’ll have to snowk our way oot of here. Tak ma haund. Can you see it? I cannae. The mune’s forsaken us, the jilter.'

* * *

Hector took up his position at court, where he discovered he had just the fair, lissom looks, but far too weak a head, for the handsome, hard-drinking circles of the King, and instead became a pet of the Queen. It pleased her disappointed Majesty to treat him as if he were a lean-shanked pantaloon, though he was of an age with her, which hurt his amour-propre at first, but he grew into the part, making dusty dominie jokes in four of his five languages, calling her waiting-gentlewomen _my child_ , wringing his hands and wearing long gowns. It had the very great advantage of letting people think him harmless.

Patrick sailed as purser to the Bay of Biscay, where Admiral Çubiaurre singed his fluffy boy’s beard for him; as second he voyaged to the Guinea coast, where he was seduced by a young man who claimed he could dally forever, since his father, the Oba Ehegbuda, had like Priam forty-nine sons to spare. As captain he was in the Spanish Main, where his crew of French ruffians and Maroons mutinied and put him ashore naked, and as commander of a flotilla he took him to the Moluccas, where he befriended a Sultan, made a fortune, and lost the moiety of it in intrigues with the Portuguese. It is oft observed that the shrewdest and luckiest sailors are sad misfortunate gulls by land, but it does not necessarily follow that limited success afloat confers the reverse on terra firma.

Nonetheless Patrick garnered some small fame, and so when it was put about that this celebrated mariner, new-knighted on his very deck by a foreign ambassador to whom his Majesty found it convenient to show friendly, lay at the sign of the Grapes, there to receive his friends and duck his creditors, Hector, who had come south at the joining of the English and Scottish crowns, hastened to the Liberty of the Duchy of Lancaster.

Patrick’s parlour was thick with bravoes and the smoke of their pipes, but when the hostess came with Hector’s message he dismissed them all, and a curious thing it was to see those rakehells squeeze meekly down the passage back to the public rooms, saluting the stooped, hollow-cheeked pedant who was supplanting them in their hero’s company.

‘Hector, ma jo, ma jo!’ The fine lace at Patrick’s neck and wrists was grubby; his doublet, embroidered with mulberry leaves in green and gold, open almost to the waist, revealed an expanse of stained shirt and dense black hair. That same on his head had retreated, and his untrimmed beard was making inroads upon his cheekbones north and his clavicle south. As Hector’s sight adjusted to the dark, fuggy room (tobacco was most sternly prohibited at court, by freak of His Majesty) he saw that what he had thought a shadow falling on Patrick’s face was a wide scar, pitted with blue speckles. The same injury, it seemed, had sheared away his teeth on the left side, for his cheek was caved in, and reduced the cartilage of his left ear to tatters. Seeing Hector’s stare, he put his fingers to it. ‘A kittle charge of gunpowder. Nane of th’enemy’s doing. Come to my arms, man, they’ve lang been toom of thee.’

Patrick’s embrace was a choking fume of stale sack, week-old linen and tar. For all their long, enforced estrangement, Hector would gladly have sunk himself in it, fathoms deep and for eternity. He murmured a suggestion to this effect into the flittered ear. Patrick threw back his head, pushed Hector to arm’s length and laughed his loud, catching laugh. He fell as suddenly silent and said, ‘I feel it cannot be expressed, but by answering: because it was he, because it was myself.’ He blinked and raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Cam ben, so. Bring that jug of sack.’ Hector followed him into the bedchamber.

Once within, Hector shrugged off his gown, and again took Patrick in his arms to kiss, this time with the ferocity of carnal intent. He backed him against the bedpost, carved in the form of a Triton, which Patrick clasped behind his own back, as though he were a draiggled carline sentenced to burn or drown.

‘Hector, will you hear a confession?’

'Closeted thus?’ Hector cuffed him lightly. ‘Are you turned papist?’

‘Not I,’ Patrick coughed; his eyes were blank and and his mouth slack with profoundest shame. ‘But those douce and mensefu Grecian delichts we had as hauflins—they’re no what I’m wantin noo. I’m dozint wi the life I’ve led. I want excitation; gin I’m tae feel aathing at aa, you maun use me as een the deil wouldna. Do you understand me? Can you do’t?’

‘I do. I will.’

When at length they were spent, Hector poured them both a cup of wine, propped himself on the bolsters and spread his legs, settling Patrick between them and back against his chest.

‘Whan I saw you there on the lintel, thrummlen your haunds thegither,’ Patrick said, ‘I thocht how could ma Hector e’er have grown sae auld and wabbit? But by Christ you can fuck. And you’re bonny and braw yet, athoot your claes, anyways.’

‘When I saw you, I thought you looked like a bloodthirsty buccaneer. Which is what you are. Proving me the sager judge of character.’ He traced a villainous-looking scar that interrupted the black fur of Patrick’s thigh, ending by gently brushing his ballsack with the back of his hand, causing him to yelp. ‘Tell me the tales of all of these.’

Before he had even wound up one immense yarn, the new welts that Hector had raised with his nails, teeth and the flat of his sword were swelling purple on Patrick’s skin, his head and eyelids drooping.

‘I should go. Let you sleep. But say this, what voyage have you next in mind?’

Patrick blinked sleepily and groaned. ‘Ah, Hector, spare ma puir heid. I cannae tell _you_ a lie. Ma brither asked me to undertak somewhat I’d liefer no touch.’

‘I know. I saw your name subscribed to a deed. One of a dozen Gentlemen Adventurers, contracted to _plant civilisation in the hitherto most barren Isle of Lewis, and to develop the extraordinary rich resources of the same for the public good and the King’s profit_.’ Hector’s body was rigid, his voice still light and brittle, not now with amatory jest, but with contempt. ‘How could you?’

Patrick tore himself away and backed to the foot of the bed, drawing up his knees like a small boy caught in some nursery crime. ‘You kennt that. And you cam here and—had me.’

‘Yes. Policy grows to be a habit, I’m afraid.’ Hector gave a withered, courtly smile, but his eyes were damp and tender with supplication. ‘There’s still time. Resign the commission.’

‘Why? What loue was eer lost betwixt you and the Macleods of Lewis?’

‘None, or something less. But they are Gaels, and I am a Gael. In dispossessing them, you dispossess me, and if you believe those words of the seigneur de Montaigne you spoke back to me this morning, you dispossess yourself.’ These words, having a certain Edenic dignity, caused Hector to jump from the bed and search for his discarded shirt.

‘As for masel, I care na by. I’ve possesst, and lost, and possesst again. Been possesst forbye.’ Patrick smiled wanly, unregarded by Hector, who was bent over, retrieving his breeches. 'Mebbe that was the seigneur’s mistake, tae think that a man cares formaist for himsel, and that to loue anither as yirsel is the heichest loue of aa.’

‘Then it was the mistake of a greater Seigneur than he of Montaigne,’ Hector snapped. He threw Patrick’s shirt at his head. ‘Get dressed.’

He laid the garment aside. ‘Gin you presume to speak in His Name you should abhor me for the slaves I sold to the Spaniards in Santo Domingo. Or the Molucca island fowk I slaughtered for spices.’

‘Pagans.’

‘Men.’

Patrick slowly stretched his folded limbs, wincing. He rose from the bed and stood with his hands held open, a little away from his sides, that were as heavily marked as any papist image of the Man of Wounds. Hector faced him, feeling most distinctly the moral disadvantage of the clothed before the naked.

‘Don’t go to Lewis. The King means to pull up Gaeldom by the roots. I can’t bear it.’

‘Yet you sit at his richt knee as he does it, because you hae done it aareadies to yourself, and it is that you cannae bide. I talked to a vintner whae supplies Whitehaa yestreen. He had aa the claik.’ Patrick adopted a most unsteady Cockney. ‘Sir Ector is a Swede, or a Dane, or some such fing what the Queen brought wiv her from ome. He eats her grey coney in a stew every night, know what I mean?’

Hector managed a mirthless snuffle.

‘I know. But I beg you in the bowels of Christ,’ Hector fell on his knees and clasped Patrick’s hands, laying his cheek against his belly. ‘If you love me—’

Patrick freed his right hand and stroked Hector’s fading golden hair. ’Whisht, whisht. I loue thee truly, and willnae gang agin thee.’

* * *

Patrick did not keep his word. Nothing in his course of life had induced him to believe his promises of more use to himself, his friends, his country or his King when whole than broken, but he nonetheless had need of much self-deceit to forswear himself. His knowledge of the Gaels—that they were no salvage men, but learned in their genealogies and history, with a lively sense of the law of possession—would be an asset to the expedition. He would temper the blind hysterics of the Lawlander against Rome and priestcraft, and broker compromise. He would save lives. All this he told himself, and none of it he did.

The plantation, or re-plantation, of Lewis was at first a success for the adventurers and the Crown, and then it became, with the intervention of a very belligerent Mackenzie, something of a failure. In the wake of it Patrick made once again for the New World, trading in Santo Domingo, Magarita Island and Boburata. This time he retained enough gold to settle in decent obscurity on the coast of Fife, composing his household of former crewmen, chiefest and closest among whom was an old Dutch pilot whose matchless seamanship had many times preserved his master’s life and goods. Their love was a quotidian one, founded in work and material objects, almost without conscious emotion, shared simply and unquestioningly as a quart of small beer or a loaf of bread, and as satisfying to the body. Like many honest men who have led duplicitous lives, in safe retirement Patrick raised Loyalty to a kind of idol in his mind, reserving his deepest and most superstitious reverences for her. He never saw Hector again.

Meanwhile, that gentleman exercised a good deal of Christian forbearance upon his bitterness at his erstwhile lover’s perfidy, so that it dug over many years a deep and disregarded well in his heart, that flooded with poison. With the Queen’s death he lost what influence he had at court, and took it into his mind to marry, selecting a plain, meek alderman’s daughter not quite half his age but twice his worth in land and plate. She died of fever after being brought to bed of a stillborn son, which Hector took as a judgement upon himself for betrayal of his nature, or unnature. Then the old King died, and Hector found himself, somewhat to his surprise, of interest to the new. Having some experience of innocent young wives perplexed by their husbands’ masculine amities, he contrived to do his Majesty good service in repairing relations with the Queen after the murder of the favourite he had inherited from his father. And so it was that Hector went north of Hadrian’s Wall for the first time in many years, to attend upon the King at his much-retarded Scottish coronation.

The King having expressed a wish to see once more the place of his birth, the royal party took a detour on their return south. It was the occasion for a lapse into some older habits also, for freed from the constraints of temperance and gravity which his wife imposed, the little King drank far more than was good for him at the banquet, and skipped up and down the length of the Great Hall, crying, ‘Thus did we thirty years ago, in our boots of brass and Spanish leather, as proof our infantile infirmities were past!’ For the King was born with weak and twisted limbs, so much that he could not follow his family to London at the Union of Crowns, but was held behind at Dunfermline, where his guardian had made for him the corrective boots that allowed him at last, aged nearly four, to traverse the palace hall unaided.

Then he collapsed into a chair by the fire, and grew melancholy, weeping over the brother who was the picture of princely virtue, taken by God to himself with the sweet shoots of his young manhood were yet green. Hector assumed an expression of sincere sympathy, sat down beside him, and pressed his hand, which gave the king only over to further tears, this time for his mother, so open-handed, dignified and graceful, the patroness of poets, musicians, artists and players—

‘And oh,’ he wailed, ‘how I failed her in her late years, when she bore with such noble fortitude her debilities and solitude!’

The attendant upon his left murmured that His Majesty was always most assiduous in his filial duty, but perhaps, if he were permitted to make a suggestion, His Majesty might honour his mother’s memory by an embassy to King Christian in Denmark, and mend a connection grown a trifle strained by the vicissitudes of the continental wars.

‘Oh yes!’ The King drummed his feet against the legs of the chair. ‘We must prepare it this instant! We shall send the flower of our Scots nobility.’

‘Not quite this instant, sir, if I may make so bold—by the time the diplomats are assembled and the ships readied, it will be late in the year indeed to attempt those waters. Recall that the late Queen herself, upon the occasion of her marriage, was driven back—’

The King deprecated this caution with a rare, but quite horrible oath. ‘And did not our father brave that self-same brine to greet her, his boots still on, with a kiss in the Scottish fashion, to the scandal of the Danish court? And are we not, as sons of Britannia, all masters over the North Sea?’ His voice rose into the note of querulous command that Hector had come to loathe above all sounds. ‘We demand the finest sailors in Christendom, and we shall have them here, and now! Who will sail my ships for me?’ He leapt to his feet, which did not, in truth, make him much taller than Hector seated on a joint-stool.

A devil entered Hector then, and he would never be able to say, though he lived the brave, bleak experiment of the Commonwealth of England almost through, to hear upon his deathbed of the embarquement of the restored King from Holland, what had secured the fiend’s admission. Was it contempt for this puny, bandy, spluttering Englishman who had, eight years belatedly, deigned to sit upon the Scottish throne, and never did a courageous thing before he set foot upon the scaffold? Or a quarter-century’s warping and souring of the only true, passionate and disinterested love his soul and flesh had ever known? Or hatred of self, for turning from his birthright of pristine art and courtesy to serve a young and a savage god, the bloody Moloch of adventuring Britain? Perhaps none of these were, in the end, discrete and different things.

He cleared his throat delicately. ‘I believe, your Majesty, I know just the man.’

**Author's Note:**

> **Scots Glossary**
> 
> ilka: each  
> shilpit: feeble  
> sikerness: security  
> aathing: everything  
> heichest: highest  
> gin: if  
> major-minded: high-minded, noble  
> mettlefu: courageous  
> kimmer: woman  
> sapsie: sentimental, soppy  
> snowk: sniff  
> jilter: coquette  
> dominie: schoolmaster  
> jo: darling  
> kittle: lively  
> toom: empty  
> cam ben: come into an inner room  
> carline: old woman, peasant woman  
> douce: sweet, but also 'genteel' in the deprecatory sense  
> mensefu: sensible, decorous  
> hauflins: youths  
> dozint: dazed, numb  
> deil: devil  
> lintel: threshold  
> thrummlen: twisting, wringing  
> wabbit: weak  
> athoot: without  
> claes: clothes  
> liefer: rather  
> care na by: don't care  
> claik: gossip  
> aareadies: already  
> whisht: hush  
> gang agin: oppose


End file.
